


Everyone Looking For Someone

by ineptshieldmaid



Category: Original Work
Genre: Other, Soulmate-Identifying Timers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 22:51:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5603965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ineptshieldmaid/pseuds/ineptshieldmaid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a nifty collective sci-fi thing going around on Tumblr, themed around an image of someone with a countdown timer embedded on their wrist. The caption, at <a href="http://illness-and-instruments.tumblr.com/post/3139087743/timer-2009-if-a-clock-could-count-down-to-the">illnessandinstruments</a>, reads: “If a clock could count down to the moment you meet your soul mate, would you want to know?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everyone Looking For Someone

**Author's Note:**

> There are a host of [Interesting short stories](http://ineptshieldmaid.tumblr.com/post/50229259799/fluffixation-forlackofabettermuse) appended to the post by now. Some are cute - meetings in cafeterias, long-distance internet romance overshadowed by the possibility that the person on the other end might turn up only for you to find out they're not your soulmate, and so on. Typically, I like the cynical ones - the person with a stopped clock; the patient who woke up in hospital as their clock stopped, and married the doctor, without checking who else in the room might be unclocked.
> 
> (Update: apparently the image & concept are from the movie TiMER. This was not spelled out anywhere in the Tumblr thread...)

Here’s the thing: it wasn’t supposed to work. Lying to people is pretty standard in certain kinds of psych experiments - this one probably wouldn’t have got through one of those old-fashioned ethics committees, but we’ve moved on since then. We pay our subjects well.

We gave out 100 timers in the first batch. They were implanted under the skin, like contraceptives; and unlike the ones you get today, on your wrist where everyone can see them, our first subjects wore them under their clothes. The ones I installed, I installed them on the left hand side of the chest, right over the heart.

The timers were more randomly assigned. They don’t show a countdown until you’ve been wearing them for a few minutes - in the first batch, at least, what numbers they showed were determined by an algorithm Stacy worked out - it took the wearer’s body temperature and heart rate, and some randomly-assigned variables, and spat out a time.

Fifty people were told what the timer signified. We called them Group 1. Group 2 weren’t told what the timer was for. No one’s timer gave them any more than five years. We checked in with them every few months over that time - asked all kinds of questions. About their health, their relationships, their life plans. Plenty of people thought the timer was telling them how long they had left to live - even the group who’d been told they were counting down to meet their soulmate, even they couldn’t shake the idea. And we kept track of them for ten years after that. We wanted to know if lack of free will (as perceived by the fifty subjects looking for their soul mates) made relationships stronger, or more likely to disintegrate. The null hypothesis was that nothing significant would happen - some couples stay together, some don’t, timers be damned.

We had a proper control group, of course; fifty ordinary folk who answered our surveys and collected their money and probably thought we were all mad. We called them Group 3.

Here’s the thing we hadn’t expected: the people with the timers, both groups, consistently reported happier lives. They made more confident choices, were more likely to finish projects they started, took better care of their friends and family. There was a secondary peak to the curve, though - there were more people in those groups who reported severe anxiety than in the control group. Nine people turned up to have the timer removed within two years, all of them well before their clocks ran down. Rates of suicide attempts in Groups 1 and 2 were slightly higher than in Group 3, but sample the wasn’t big enough to determine if that was statistically valid, and alas, we never got to run a full-scale trial. Funny thing about that was that none of them succeeded.

The fifty people looking for their soul mates were more likely to end relationships before their timers ran down. We’d expected that. Where it got weird, though, was that both groups started forming relationships when their timers ran down. Group 2 didn’t know it, of course: they’d report, when we called them the day after, ‘it’s funny, you know - i was ordering lunch when it ran down’; ‘I was in hospital that day’; ‘I don’t know why I did it, but I saw those numbers run down and she was there and… how am I going to tell my wife?’ The group who knew what they were looking for were no more or less likely to stay in those relationships than the group who weren’t: it was the timers which made the difference.

That’s the part which they took to the newspapers: magic clocks, happy lovers, that little bit of certainty in your life. That’s the part which made millions, which has generated a whole new field of bio-psychological research. We should never have gone public - but you’ve got to publish, or where will your job be?

The part they never put in the newspapers - it’s in the scientific journals, if you know where to look - is this: the people who got together when the timer ran down? They’re no happier, no more likely to stay together, and lead no more fulfilling lives than the control group. The forty-odd people who found the soulmate they knew they were looking for: twenty of them had broken up within three years. Two more had developed chronic mental health problems. There were abusive spouses and bad matches and people as lost and confused as ever.

The positive happiness and wellbeing effects, compared to the control group, wore off. They came back to us, almost all of them. They didn’t ask us to take the watches off, not even right after the timer ran down. They asked us to wind them up again.

Wearing a countdown timer gives adult humans a sense of purpose. That’s all we found. It’s in the journals, if you know what to look for.


End file.
